DOJ: Family Can’t Run Their Business as Catholics – John Malcolm

In our system, a corporation is a collection of individuals and/or other corporations organized to do something, it might be to run a food bank, build houses, run a hospital, organize workers in a workplace, or in this case make heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment. A corporation is by legal definition and tradition, going back to the early 1800s (at least) a person. It, or its duly authorized representatives, usually officers, can make contracts (which is why it started out that way), and have all the freedoms of a natural person. The Citizens United case a few years ago ruled that corporations have full free speech rights.

Until Now

The administration has decided that corporations do not have freedom of religion. These types of things do not come up very often because in the normal course of doing business, they just don’t arise. And in most cases of corporations the owners (stockholders) are so diverse that exercising most rights could actually hurt the business. That does not mean they don’t exist, they just are not exercised. You don’t have to exercise your right to free speech for it to exist. In this case we have a corporation (as I understand it) wholly owned by four people, which is not at all uncommon, even many farms are organized this way for tax and inheritance purposes. The owners are believing Catholics and refuse to pay for sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

Here is the article, I’ll have a bit more to say at the end.

William, Paul and James Newland and their sister, Christine Ketterhagen, who together own Hercules Industries, have no right to conduct their family business in a manner that comports with their Catholic faith.

The federal government can and will compel them to either surrender their business or to engage in activities the Catholic faith teaches are intrinsically immoral.

Never before has an administration taken such a bold step to strip Americans of the freedom of conscience — a right for which, over the centuries, many Christian martyrs have laid down their lives, and which our Founding Fathers took great care to protect in a First Amendment that expressly guarantees the free exercise of religion.

As the Founders understood, no government has legitimate authority to take this right away, because it does not come from government. It comes from God. The very purpose of government is to protect this right. A government that seeks to strip it away from the people is by that very process stripping away its own legitimacy.

What we are seeing from the Obama administration today — in its attack on religious liberty — is simply evil. When government seeks to compel individuals to act against their consciences and to engage in activities that, if willfully done, would imperil their immortal souls, there is no other word for it.

The Newland family owns and operates Hercules Industries, a Colorado-based corporation that manufactures heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment. Through their hard work and dedication, and through their willingness to reinvest their own money in building their family business, they have managed to create jobs for 265 people while exerting a positive influence on the communities they serve.

The Newlands believe the morality the Catholic faith teaches them must animate their lives not only within the walls of the churches they attend, but literally everywhere else, as well — in the way they deal with their families, their neighbors and, yes, their business.

The Newlands sued to protect their free exercise of religion in this regard because Health and Human Services SecretaryKathleen Sebelius issued a regulation, under the Obamacare law, that requires virtually all health care plans to cover — without cost-sharing — sterilizations, artificial contraception and abortifacients.

The administration is just plain wrong here, the owners of a corporation have a God-given right (as we all do) of freedom of religion, so does the corporation. The government cannot revoke rights given by God, that’s both common sense and basic constitutional law. The issue is exactly the same as is facing the Catholic church.

The other thing I don’t understand is where the government found the power to regulate any internal part of a firm. Firms are private entities (persons, if you will) the government has no more (and no less) right to regulate their internal policies, than it has to tell me I have to wear clean underwear everyday. You, as a stockholder, employee, customer, supplier, or anything else have a choice of whether or not you choose to deal with them. Their rights (like yours) end where you infringe on the rights of another.

Anything else is statism at best, tyranny at worst.

Are you really willing to sell your freedom for a free birth control pill?

There is so much going on behind the scenes in this administration that I’m sure if we knew it all we’d be completely demoralized! That’s why when you hear people say it’s OK if Obama gets re-elected as long as the GOP has control of the House & Senate, bring them to reality. All the illegal executive orders and just plain trampling of our laws by Obama and his minions will continue of he’s given a second term….regardless of who controls the House & Senate.

That’s where I was for a long time, and in America, it’s not the worst position. Not anymore, this regime does whatever it wants, and takes money from authorized things to pay for it. Congress no longer has any control.

They called Nixon’s an imperial presidency but, compared to this thug, he was the very model of decorum. He has to go, by 2016 we’ll be speaking Greek.

A Reminder of Our Heritage

“Every man, who parrots the cry of ‘stand by the President’ without adding the proviso ‘so far as he serves the Republic’ takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude.”

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You’re St. Melito of Sardis!

You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins.